A rural Ontario MP says corporate farms should be denied crop insurance, farm loans, risk management payments and other farm program benefits.
Conservative MP Larry Miller has proposed a private member’s bill that would deny farm program benefits to any farm operation owned by a corporation.
Miller, who serves as chair of the House of Commons agriculture committee, has also proposed that farmers with average gross annual revenues below $10,000 a year be declared ineligible for government assistance.
For beginning farmers under 40 years of age and with no more than three years in the business, the threshold would be $5,000 annual revenue.
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Although the bill is unlikely to be debated in this Parliament, it is expected to sow the seed of a debate.
“The real purpose of the bill is to ensure that real farmers are the target of federal programs,” said Miller in a Nov. 10 interview from his largely agricultural riding in the Grey-Bruce area of central Ontario.
“It is not illegal for packing companies to own cattle or (for) grain companies to own farms but I don’t think that should qualify them to benefit from federal programs.”
Miller said he did not want to name corporate names but noted there were complaints that much of the government BSE compensation ended up in the pockets of packing companies.
There were also complaints that the former Saskatchewan Wheat Pool collected millions of dollars from the Canadian Agricultural Income Stabilization program, he said.
“It is my view that these programs should be for farmers and farmers only,” he said. “Large corporations usually have the power to get their profit out of the marketplace and farmers often don’t have that option. These programs are designed to help correct that imbalance, not give the corporations more money.”
Miller defined ineligible farm operations as those owned by a corporation with publicly traded stock, a company 40 percent or more owned by a publicly traded corporation, a corporation with more than 250 shareholders or members or a corporation with $10 million of debts coming from a farming operation.
By setting an eligibility threshold of $10,000 gross revenue per year, Miller’s bill also adds fuel to a politically charged debate about who constitutes a “real” farmer.
“That ($10,000 threshold) is low and quite honestly I started in my mind with a much higher number but when I realized how many farmers a higher number would exclude, I settled on this number,” he said.
Miller’s proposals in Bill C-479 come as amendments to the Agriculture and Agri-Food Act.
His bill is well down the parliamentary priority list and likely will not come up for debate unless this minority Parliament extends longer than expected. When he introduced the bill in the House of Commons, Miller said it is nicknamed the “farm program eligibility act.”
The Bruce County cattle producer told MPs the aim is simple.
“The purpose of this bill is to ensure that actual farmers are the primary targets and beneficiaries of federally funded farm programs,” he said.
